Can Such Things Be? eBook

“You are right,” said King, with an evident
attempt at calmness: “I knew Manton.
He then wore a full beard and his hair long, but this
is he.”

He might have added: “I recognized him
when he challenged Rosser. I told Rosser and
Sancher who he was before we played him this horrible
trick. When Rosser left this dark room at our
heels, forgetting his outer clothing in the excitement,
and driving away with us in his shirt sleeves—­all
through the discreditable proceedings we knew whom
we were dealing with, murderer and coward that he was!”

But nothing of this did Mr. King say. With his
better light he was trying to penetrate the mystery
of the man’s death. That he had not once
moved from the corner where he had been stationed;
that his posture was that of neither attack nor defense;
that he had dropped his weapon; that he had obviously
perished of sheer horror of something that he saw—­these
were circumstances which Mr. King’s disturbed
intelligence could not rightly comprehend.

Groping in intellectual darkness for a clew to his
maze of doubt, his gaze, directed mechanically downward
in the way of one who ponders momentous matters, fell
upon something which, there, in the light of day and
in the presence of living companions, affected him
with terror. In the dust of years that lay thick
upon the floor—­leading from the door by
which they had entered, straight across the room to
within a yard of Manton’s crouching corpse—­were
three parallel lines of footprints—­light
but definite impressions of bare feet, the outer ones
those of small children, the inner a woman’s.
From the point at which they ended they did not return;
they pointed all one way. Brewer, who had observed
them at the same moment, was leaning forward in an
attitude of rapt attention, horribly pale.

“Look at that!” he cried, pointing with
both hands at the nearest print of the woman’s
right foot, where she had apparently stopped and stood.
“The middle toe is missing—­it was
Gertrude!”

Gertrude was the late Mrs. Manton, sister to Mr. Brewer.

JOHN MORTONSON’S FUNERAL {1}

John Mortonson was dead: his lines in “the
tragedy ‘Man’” had all been spoken
and he had left the stage.

The body rested in a fine mahogany coffin fitted with
a plate of glass. All arrangements for the funeral
had been so well attended to that had the deceased
known he would doubtless have approved. The
face, as it showed under the glass, was not disagreeable
to look upon: it bore a faint smile, and as
the death had been painless, had not been distorted
beyond the repairing power of the undertaker.
At two o’clock of the afternoon the friends
were to assemble to pay their last tribute of respect
to one who had no further need of friends and respect.
The surviving members of the family came severally
every few minutes to the casket and wept above the
placid features beneath the glass. This did
them no good; it did no good to John Mortonson; but
in the presence of death reason and philosophy are
silent.